Regular visitors must have noticed that my blog was down for a day yesterday. Here is a shot of the mail that I received from my webhost:

It happened due to my site getting hotlinked by a plagiarist blogspot blog. Not only was my site hotlinked and copied word for word with the photos included for my article A glimpse of the real estate development in Dubai it was also submitted to digg by the blogger and he got great traffic and 1350 diggs. The load on my hosting server was so much that my webhost had to stop service since it consumed hell lot of bandwidth for a day. I was at my wits end not knowing what had happened since my site does not get tons of traffic although it does get some decent traffic. Fortunately my hosting company revealed that the site mafihotz.blogspot.com was hotlinking to my site for the above article and the blogger had used my content as it is. Not only that he was smart enough to pre-date the article as 1st Sep, ‘07 when in fact I had written the same article on 27th Sep - just to show that his was the original one.

If you don’t know, hotlinking is also called as inline linking, bandwidth theft, leeching or direct linking. It is the placing of a linked object, often an image, from one site into a web page belonging to a second site. The second site is said to have an inline link to the site where the object is located. A web browser does not differentiate between a HTML reference for an image on the same server and one on a different server even if it is entirely located on a different site. Both links would be written with the same HTML “tag”. Forms of hotlinking also include video files, mp3 files, animations etc. Most types of electronic media are susceptible to inline linking. This can be to some extent be avoided by enabling hotlinking on your site.

Mafi Hotz of mafihotz.blogspot.com is a plagiarist of the first order and must realize that this is not the way a blogger succeeds in the blogosphere. If you look at his blog you will see that quite a few posts show hotlinks to other sites. Clearly this is nothing but taking the easy road to success by being over smart. After I brought it to his notice the photos are not hotlinked any more. Hotz, please learn to give credit if you like an article. Don’t steal.

Bookmark to:

Like this article? Subscribe to the FULL RSS feed! Or add this site to Technorati Favorites